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Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

I

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;—
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

II

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

III

Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor's sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy
Shepherd-boy!

IV

Ye blesséd Creatures, I have heard the call
Ye to each other make; I see
The heavens laugh with you in your jubilee;
My heart is at your festival,
My head hath its coronal,
The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all.
Oh evil day! if I were sullen
While Earth herself is adorning,
This sweet May-morning,
And the Children are culling
On every side,
In a thousand valleys far and wide,
Fresh flowers; while the sun shines warm,
And the Babe leaps up on his Mother's arm:—
I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!
—But there's a Tree, of many, one,
A single Field which I have looked upon,
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?

V

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy,
But He beholds the light, and whence it flows,
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth, who daily farther from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

VI

Earth fills her lap with pleasures of her own;
Yearnings she hath in her own natural kind,
And, even with something of a Mother's mind,
And no unworthy aim,
The homely Nurse doth all she can
To make her Foster-child, her Inmate Man,
Forget the glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.

VII

Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learned art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his “humorous stage”
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.

VIII

Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!
On whom those truths do rest,
Which we are toiling all our lives to find,
In darkness lost, the darkness of the grave;
Thou, over whom thy Immortality
Broods like the Day, a Master o'er a Slave,
A Presence which is not to be put by;
Thou little Child, yet glorious in the might
Of heaven-born freedom on thy being's height,
Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke
The years to bring the inevitable yoke,
Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife?
Full soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight,
And custom lie upon thee with a weight
Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!

IX

O joy! that in our embers
Is something that doth live,
That nature yet remembers
What was so fugitive!
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest—
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realised,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised:
But for those first affections,
Those shadowy recollections,
Which, be they what they may,
Are yet the fountain light of all our day,
Are yet a master light of all our seeing;
Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make
Our noisy years seem moments in the being
Of the eternal Silence: truths that wake,
To perish never;
Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,
Nor Man nor Boy,
Nor all that is at enmity with joy,
Can utterly abolish or destroy!
Hence in a season of calm weather
Though inland far we be,
Our Souls have sight of that immortal sea
Which brought us hither,
Can in a moment travel thither,
And see the Children sport upon the shore,
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore.

• dressed
• heavenly
• wherever
• an allusion to “My Heart Leaps Up” and the intense emotional response he had to the sight of beauty in Nature
• a small drum
• Because of his youth, and the fact that he lives within the beauty of Nature, the shepherd-boy is similar to a hermit, whom the Romantics idealized as being intimately involved with Nature.
• crowning
• picking flowers
• Note that this line expresses a similar sentiment to what Wordsworth expresses in “I Travelled Among Unknown Men”: a longing for things that are no longer in existence.
• a reference to the “celestial light” of Stanza I that seemed to surround all of Nature
• Plato's philosophy states that the Soul has total knowledge, but forgets it in the process of being born into a physical body. Nothing is learned, only remembered.
• Wordsworth differs with Plato, saying that forgetting is not total and abrupt, but gradual.
• Throughout this section, images of darkness will replace images of light as the child grows to adulthood.
• that “celestial light” of the first stanza and the “visionary gleam,” of Stanza IV whose loss Wordsworth is lamenting.
• the child, closer to the truth, still possesses the “visionary gleam”
• another reference to the “celestial light” and “visionary gleam”
• Earth is not our mother, but acts like our mother.
• a governess, nanny
• Wordsworth again says that we are not Earth's children, but her foster-children.
• not only a convict in prison, but any member of a group residing in an institution, like a hospital or boarding school
• brief outbursts
• learns, studies carefully, memorizes
• equipment, apparatus
• The child is physically small but has an enormous soul.
• The child is the one who can still see what the adult has lost sight of.
• quickly passing, short-lived
• a never-ending blessing
• the instinct not to accept the appearance of things but to look deeper to understand the essence of the thing
• The process of aging and losing the instinctive feelings treasured by the Romantics has been compared to a journey from east to west, from the ocean shore inland.

1. Notes
2. Reading Pointers for Sharper Insights
3. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
   1. Inroduction
   2. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in Seven Parts
   3. Kubla Khan
4. William Blake
   1. Introduction
   2. The Lamb
   3. The Tyger
   4. The Chimney Sweeper
   5. The Chimney Sweeper
   6. A Poison Tree
5. William Wordsworth
   1. Inroduction
   2. Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798
   3. My Heart Leaps Up
   4. Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood
   5. The Lucy Poems
      1. Strange fits of Passion have I Known
      2. She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
      3. I travelled among unknown men
      4. Three years she grew in sun and shower
      5. A slumber did my spirit seal
6. George Gordon, Lord Byron
   1. Introduction
   2. On the castle of chillon
   3. She walk in beauty
   4. Prometheus
7. Percy Bysshe Shelley
   1. Introduction
   2. Ozymandias
   3. Ode to the West Wind
   4. Adonais
8. John Keats
   1. Introduction
   2. To Hope
   3. Ode on Melancholy
   4. Ode to a Nightingale
9. Copyright